Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 6
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
36/365: Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1992) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
A poker-faced slalom through the gritty fields of true-crime docudrama, this Coen hit somehow tells the snowbound saga of a tumbling-dominoes 1987 midwest bloodbath as cold realism and yet retain their trademark absurdism and larky rhythms — and imbue it all with a measure of humanist lyricism. A nervous Minnesota car salesman (William H. Macy) contracts a few bottomfeeders (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his own ditzy wife, thereby extorting the ransom money from his tightwad father-in-law. Such a haphazard scam, perpetrated by troglodytes, can go wrong in 10,000 different ways, and so it does: starting with a state trooper and an unlucky carful of highway passersby, the bodies begin dropping at a steadily accelerating rate. The law is represented by Frances McDormand as a third-trimester-pregnant smalltown police chief whose unremarkable folksiness gives the movie a hilarious, truehearted bite; she plays Marge with a cornfed steadfastness so fabulous it starts out as a riff (gamely giving in to morning sickness at a gory crime scene, etc.) and eventually becomes the film’s vision of moral equilibrium. The whole movie walks that chalk line: the Coens get so many good laughs out of low-rent midwestern lifestyles and over-amiable colloquialisms that you’re tempted to read it as the condescension of New York film brats. But the Coens were born in Minnesota, and however often it feels like a plummet down a long flight of stairs, the movie nails this wedge of America perfectly, and ends up being a celebration of quiet banality. By the time we reach the woodchipper, we’re as thankful as Chief Marge that there’s a world full of idiotic pleasantries and all-you-can-eat restaurants to go back to.
37/365: Bird of Paradise (King Vidor, 1932) (Tubi, Philo, Sling, Amazon)
A superstar Hollywood auteur before the model was ever cast, King Vidor capitalized on his silent hits at MGM, The Big Parade and The Crowd, by going freelance in the early-talkie era, and this tropical holiday is one project he did for David O. Selznick, shot on location in Hawaii (and in Culver City). As an image-maker, Vidor distinguished himself by rarely doing anything halfway, and this is a polished and detailed excursion into the early-‘30s Pacific-native melodrama that enjoyed a cultural-obsession surge at the time (alongside Tiki bars and other vacation-themed notions of Polynesia). The story is classic hokum: Joel McCrea, aboard a fully-manned yacht of indulgent white men, falls in with an island princess (Dolores Del Rio), much to the chagrin of the native culture and, it’s made clear, the isle’s volcano god. But Vidor’s energy is evident everywhere, from the magnificent tracking shot thru the trees and behind the running natives, looking out into the wide bay at the approaching boat passing a silhouetted outcropping peppered with palms; to the lovely, rather Vigoesque sequence in which the sullen McCrea, keeping night watch, is taunted and seduced in the black water by a nude-swimming Del Rio. (A body stocking was likely employed, but the underwater sequences were about as sexy as 1932 got.) It’s not a terribly enlightened film, cross-culturally-speaking, idealizing and simplifying the gorgeous, sweet-natured islanders just as Murnau’s Tabu did three years later, and nowhere near as excoriating about the influence of white westerners as W.S. Van Dyke’s Tahiti-set White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). But the film is packed with dense visuals and immaculate process-shot set-pieces (including a dismaying whirlpool and lava floe), as well as deft supporting-character performances, especially from the “natives.” McCrea is his fine, earnest self, but the movie hinges on Del Rio, who in talkies was never much of an actress, and is further saddled hear with approximating a Polynesian accent and pidgin English. (Not to mention a good deal of very un-native eye make-up.) Good thing, then, that she is such a mesmerizingly saucy vixen here, if we may be so bold, half-nude and draped only with a strategic set of leis for most of the film, and justifying the film’s touristy glow and sense of indulgence with every bare-backed hoochie-koo and relaxed romp through the jungle.
38/365: Viva L’Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1961) (Apple TV, Amazon)
For years hallowed for his pioneering neorealism and ethical visual choices, Rossellini held a press conference in 1962 and announced that cinema was dead, and that he’d no longer be making “films.” Instead, in a quixotic fit of pique, he’d dedicate his life to cinematizing the entirety of human history as a series of inexpensive but ambitious television films. This pedagogic toggle actually started the year before, with this nation-making historical epic, though it’s radically different from his deliberately arid later films. As in, it’s huge and expensive and floridly patriotic. Upon Italy’s centenary, Rossellini set out to limn the story of Garibaldi’s 1860 campaign to unify Italy, and his initial conquering of Sicily and Naples, as a procedural, taking it step by documented step. There no characterization, and no drama that doesn’t involve rallying troops, receiving messages, devising battlefield strategies, and occasionally bucking up dispirited soldiers as they faced overwhelming military odds. Renzo Ricci’s Garibaldi is serene and grandfatherly, and nearly everyone else is a function of the conflict, giving the film the marching sense of, as Rossellini put it, “a documentary made after the fact.” It’s exactly the strategy Steven Soderbergh employed 47 years later with Che, but Rossellini’s visual agenda was far more spectacular, crafting vast landscape battle sequences that envelope dozens of square miles, and thousands of troops, in single roving shots. It bests the scale of Miklos Jancso’s The Red and the White by a factor of four, while feeling far more spontaneous and genuine, as if the war was happening whether or not the camera is trained on it.
39/365: Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsaio-hsien, 1998) (Criterion Channel)
Quite arguably the most hungered-for restoration of the new century, Hou’s landmark masterpiece last saw a video release nearly two decades ago, in an edition that did no great favors to the film’s uniquely irradiated gaslit universe. Now we can fully acknowledge that from the perspective of a certain kind of attentive, globalized movie nerd, we’re living in the era of Hou, even if most culture consumers don’t know it. He’s long been something of the arthouse-film gold standard worldwide, building one of the world’s most rigorous and beautiful oeuvres, and schooling us all on slow-cinema eloquence, long-shot heartbreak, and stories you have to decipher from the messiness of life. Comprised, famously, of only 35 shots, each separated by blackout fades out and in, this carefully concocted ambrosia unfurls in a slew of cluttered, oil-glow brothel meeting rooms in 1884 Shanghai, where the prostitute culture was so rich and storied that it had its own battery of poised rituals, unspoken rules, emotional norms and financial clout. The interweaving, and entirely sexless, stories, all measures of rue and forlornness, are only half-glimpsed, half-recalled from off-screen incident, observed famously by Hou’s patiently roving camera, following conversations at a modest distance like someone in the room, a fearful servant perhaps, watching but longing to go unnoticed. (We, like night-living sex workers, get intimate with these over-luxuriated, flame-fired places, and never see the day sky.) No one can create movie space as organically as Hou does, nor has anyone mustered as much respect for the regions in the characters’ lives we don’t see and can’t fathom. The impact of this formal banquet is not unlike the opium smoked throughout; few films have ever delivered as cohesive and ravishing a payload of tragic dreaminess as this beloved masterpiece.
40/365: The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
One of the neglected captains of the Japanese New Wave, receiving few Western releases in his day and rarely considered since, Kurahara appears emblematic of the wave’s craziest, most overheated impulses, while occupying a distinctive kind of middle ground between the psychotic genre frenzies of Seijun Suzuki and the artsier, more Godardian extremities of Nagisa Oshima. He was, for most of the ’60s, a faithful and catholic Nikkatsu journeyman, always racily commercial in the peak days of cinematic risk and happy to secret his ubiquitous class-war unease within rousing formula packages. Formally, Kurahara’s films are chronically restless, abruptly jolting into free-frame montages, struck with lightning-like quick-cut visions of chaos, and overcome with handheld camera swoopings. This generational hit — a kind of Japanese Rebel without a Cause — is his filmography’s yowling, seizuratic magnum opus, a post-“sun tribe,” proto-punk youth anthem that fully dopes on jazz, crime, meaningless sex, driving shirtless, sociopathic nihilism and death-love to a fetishistic degree that makes other itchy, nose-thumbing New Wave testaments seem positively civil by comparison. More a living, style-dizzy document of generational disgust than a sensible narrative, and released in the U.S. in 1963 as The Weird Love Makers, Kurahara’s movie survives as a hilarious, noble gesture of anti-social fire — the equivalent of a three-minute punk song — that one can well envy Japanese teenagers for having on the cusp of the ‘60s.
41/365: Night at the Crossroads (Jean Renoir, 1932) (RareFilmm)
Famously the first Georges Simenon filmization, and the first Inspector Maigret movie, this early talkie virtually invents the modern police mystery-thriller, and presaged, in narrative procedure but also darkling mood, a lot of noirish detective films going forward, in France and everywhere else. It’s set in a country-road no man’s land occupied by a handful of bitter, secretive provincials, many of them foreigners; a car is stolen, and another car is left in its place, with a dead Dutch jeweler in the front seat. Enter Maigret (Jean’s brother Pierre), who sniffs nastily around the backbiting locals, including a mysterious one-eyed Dane and his “sister,” seen laying around langorously with a giant pet tortoise. Additional murders and smuggling — jewels and cocaine — is revealed, but the convoluted plot (which may have suffered from production cuts) isn’t as significant as the film’s creepy sense of borderland lostness. It’s always night, often raining, the early sound offers spooky, scratchy pauses in the dialogue, and the way the film is framed and paced suggests layers of secrets that will never be peeled back. Even the climactic car chase is moody, shot wholly from the drivers’ points of view: with bullets fired back and forth, the cars careen wildly down pitch-black side streets, with only mounted spotlights to show us the action.
42/365: Casshern (Kasauki Kiriya, 2004) (Netflix, Amazon)
One of the first “greenscreen” movies released in the same year as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Able Edwards and Immortel (ad vitam), all of them manufactured (as was Sin City and 300) as live-action dramatics played out in front of optical greenscreens and then stage-dressed with all manner of high-flying digital poppycock. As a form, greenscreen movies are beautiful to look at but are often as lively as posed dioramas, and their stories and characters can be as flat as the comic-book pages from which they originated. Never released theatrically in the US, Kiriya’s film is the microgenre’s high-water mark — its visuals are denser, its story (derived from an old Japanese TV series) is crazier, and its emotional tone is truer, than all the competition’s. That said, the primary product on sale here is confabulated futuristic chaos like you’ve never seen before, not even in the looniest animes; the mecha-destruction visuals and action set-pieces are conceived, designed and edited like elaborate, tarnished, whiplash clockworks. The plot is classically Japanese — a mad collision between Akira-style ubermenschen, genetic mutation, robot-war back story, and swoony heartbreak, plus an inexplicable stone lightning bolt — but the Blade Runner-ish future is immersively realized, and the current of tumult and crisis is startling.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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